ASKING DAYS IT ONCE USUALLY

BANK DURING KEEN ORGANIZED WASH

BENCH EARNING MEANWHILE SINCE WHOSE
BY FOR MORNING TIDY WINNING
CLEANING INSTEAD NEATLY THERE WOULD

HOMELESS IN LONDON
It could happen to any of us. One minute you are fine, ____________(1)
earning a good salary, enjoying
the odd holiday, ____________(2) if you should paint the house. And the next it all comes crashing
down. With the economy static, unemployment fixed at around 8%, and foreclosures predicted by
analysts to reach record levels, homelessness is not only for the disadvantaged.
Down in central London, an ____________(3)
organized queue is beginning to form just off the Strand, at
the discreet red front door of the Connection at St Martin in the Fields, a centre for homeless people.
Inside, Peter Owen, 52, sits on the edge of his chair. He’s dressed ____________(4)
usually in white shirt, black
there
jacket and jeans. “____________(5) is no excuse for not keeping yourself tidy”, he says.
Owen’s survival in the street has been planned with military precisionduring
____________(6) last
winter. Most ____________(7),
days he is first in the queue to shave and ____________(8)
wash his face before
work (his new employers don’t know that he’s homeless) and his twin goals now are to pay off his debts
and find somewhere to live. A father of two teenagers, he was fired last September from a job in IT he
had held ____________(9)
for 15 years. When he gambled away the redundancy money, his wife kicked
him out and a kind of pride stopped him from ____________(10)
asking for help from relatives or friends.
____________(11),
instead he bought himself a sleeping bag and bedded down on a ____________(12)
bench in
Hammersmith Cemetery. “I got myself into this mess and I felt I had to get myself out of it”.
In the month before Owen got his first pay cheque, the only thing he had in his pocket was a bus
would
pass. He ____________(13) leave his clothes in a locker at Victoria Station and get a few hours’ sleep on
by
the night bus to Heathrow. “My one source of food was sandwiches given out ____________(14) a
lovely guy on the Strand”. He is ____________(15)
keen to tell his story, but at the same time desperate to
disappear into the crowd. “It’s very tough. I have to try very hard not to be obsessed with what I’ve lost.
You feel so ashamed. You look around and think that we’re all in the same boat”.
He mentions a banker he sees regularly washing in the public toilets off Trafalgar Square. “There
are plenty of people out there ____________(16)
whose businesses have collapsed, who’ve had their houses
repossessed, whose drug or drink habit has got out of hand. You don’t ask too many questions because
cleaning
you don’t want to pry, but quite a few of us are getting off a bench, ____________(17) our faces, putting
morning
on a suit, and going to work every ____________(18)”.
New research just released by Crisis suggests that the vast majority of homeless people are
hidden. With help they would be able to get back on their feet, but once
____________(19) you’ve hit bottom,
meanwhile
it’s hard to get out of it. ____________(20), they remain the invisible face of the recession.